


le rouge et le noir

by Nemonus



Series: look up at the sky [2]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 18:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15779484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Eris Morn, Ikora Rey, and Cayde-6 have rebelled against Eriana-3's tyrannical rule in the Tower. Now, they need to take their home back.(Or, Eris Morn's fireteam defeated Crota and now grapple with the aftermath. A world of cruelty and danger, where every meeting outside the wall is a tryst? Of all of them, Toland thrives the most.)





	le rouge et le noir

**Author's Note:**

> This is a continuation of illumynare's [Three Queens Rising](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13091958), which I adored so much I decided to live in it. The title comes from [Jorge Luis Borges quoted by M. Leona Godin](https://catapult.co/stories/column-blind-writers-notebook-on-blind-artists-and-mourning-the-lost-dark).

The power of the Vanguard did not diminish without their titles. The Light surrounded them in particular, whispered to them in particular. Each Vanguard held generations worth of knowledge: Guardian generations, the fuzzily-counted centuries of the ageless. No regime could strip that title away fully.

Eriana-3 had tried.

Rebel Guardians told Eris Morn that they sensed Ikora Rey coming. Eris herself had not known, and if there was gall at the loss she did not dwell on it. Instead she adjusted the band of black cloth over her ruined eyes and moved through the familiar halls of the ramshackle rebel compound in the oak and maple forest, listening to her compatriots whisper.

“She’s been in the Dead Zone —”

“Communing with the Traveler —”

“Coming to take the Tower back.”

The rebel stronghold was a mixture of ancient stone walls and new corrugated metal. Cayde had organized as well as he could. He gloried in being a Hunter again, in ranging around the forests for game or tracking Fallen footprints found suspiciously close to the walls. He even found himself good at leadership, when the people he was leading were disposed to independence and grumpy but unwavering justice. Everyone in the compound had their reasons for escaping what the Tower had become. Some had been particularly loyal to the Vanguard trio; some had seen the cruelty Eriana-3 donned like a cloak as she moved deeper into Hive magic; and some had been raised after Eriana’s ascendancy, then snatched out of the wild by Guardians eager to recruit more to the true cause of the Light.

Some of Cayde’s rebels called themselves the Light instead of Guardians, and if the difference in capitalized nouns confused the newborns it didn’t stop them.

Meanwhile, Eris had found the rebel walls sufficient to mask her deep hurt. The kitchens, smelling of venison and coffee, did not remind her of the meals she had shared with her fireteam. The people rushing through the halls, dirt smeared on cloaks, did not remind her of Eriana’s once-noble pristine march. Instead, they reminded her of why she had joined Eriana to fight Crota in the first place. Eris had wanted to protect people like this, fighters and nurturers and dreamers. Eriana had rebelled against the Vanguard the first time after the Hive had laid waste to the Moon, and Eris had followed her into the teeth of beasts.

When she got back to the Tower, Eriana could not seem to stop fighting the war she had won.

Eris did not know how far into the Hive hierarchy Eriana had gone, or whether her power-hunger was as Exo or Warlock or simply Eriana as it was Hive. Eris had spent sleepless nights in the rebel base wondering whether she herself thought of Eriana’s cruelty as corruption or humanity. Which would be better? Which would be worse?

On some of those nights, she had continued the rebellion in other ways. Both Eris Morn and Toland the Shattered risked lives, their own and others’, when he flickered through layers of time and space to meet her. They did not so much avoid the topic of their respective loyalties as place it aside, a loaded pistol on the bedside table.

Ikora’s Light was like none of those things. As Eris emerged into the courtyard of rocks and tires, her residual Hive-sense flinched. She smiled. Anything _that_ sense hated, Eris might truly cherish.

Guardian clothing rustled. Mourning doves and crickets cried in the forest. At first, Eris could not distinguish Ikora’s voice from the others’.

“Hey,” Cayde-6 said nearby. “Look who’s here.”

His voice swooped through the words, amused and light. He must also have missed Ikora, mustn’t he? Eris lifted her arm and Cayde took it, to guide her to the front of the crowd.

Once she arrived, he let go. Eris heard the smack of cloth as Cayde and Ikora embraced. Her Hive sense buzzed like insects in her head, warning of Ikora’s devastating power. _Death on the moon_ , said the poison green. _Broods burned in their brine._

 _Good,_ thought Eris Morn, and allowed hope to wound her.

Ikora’s voice rang out, both loud and gentle. “The wild is still wild. For a long time I have searched for an answer. It turns out, one found itself.”

Guardians asked for that answer. For a few breaths the crowd was confusing with voices and footsteps, the creak of Exo joints mixing with sighs of relief. Ikora moved through the crowd, closer and further away. Then she was beside Eris.

Eris had expected the relief; she had wondered whether the previous Warlock Vanguard was dead by the time Eriana took the title. She had doubted Ikora would fall that easily, but had been unsure whether Eriana would boast of having killed her. The fact that she was alive was a light-making miracle.

What Eris had not expected was the guilt. It slid on the surface of the grief like oil on water. _I’m sorry. I should have known. I should have stopped her. I should have seen._

But when she reached closer Ikora put out her hands and embraced her. If she sensed the guilt she did not acknowledge it, and did not let it stop her.

Against Eris’ hair Ikora said, “There is a Guardian questing for the Heart of the Black Garden.”

* * *

 The plan came together quickly after that. The rebels had always been ready to mobilize, although they had known not what for. Guardian energy, Guardian dissatisfaction, leant itself well to unexpected war. They had been reborn for it.

Ikora gave them an answer. She also gave the name of the new Guardian, someone shockingly young, raised on Earth and catapulted almost immediately into a quest to end the Vex incursion. Eris and Cayde both needed to be briefed on this part, and the mysteries of the Black Garden were mysteries indeed. So they stood around a makeshift war room table and learned.

Ikora was in communication with someone who was in communication with this venturing Guardian. When she paused, Eris almost felt the shape of Osiris’ name pass between them like a touch, but she did not speak it.

The alliance between Ikora and the new Guardian would be one pincer and Cayde’s rebels would be another in the fight to take the Tower back. Both would descend on Eriana’s realm at the same time, after the Darkness in the Black Garden had been weakened. Hopefully, its influence would dilute Eriana’s power. Both sides of the pincer would keep the peace as much as they could, in order to prevent unnecessary casualties. Guardians who went to Eriana for material and praise were as likely to be duped as they were to be malicious.

In order to make sure this plan endangered as few among the innocent as possible, a corridor would need to be opened. A back door, so that Ikora and Cayde and their Guardian could catch Eriana unawares.

Hunter no longer, Eris still knew how to find that path.

* * *

 In a place as large as the Tower, it was easy for a corridor to slip from _little-used_ to _secret_ through disinterest and time. No one had ever declared these halls out of bounds. They were neither architecturally interesting nor convenient. Finding them required several strange stops on the freight elevators, leading to passageways unsuited to actual freight. Perhaps before the Tower had been the Tower, they had been used to check utilities or house refugees.

Now, Cayde lead one squad of rebels through these corridors. Ikora and the fireteam which had returned from the Black Garden took the same path for a little while and then diverted. Eris had told them that Eriana still used the Vanguard hall, although she had added doors and few saw the view from the wide open window on the other side now. She had named herself Vanguard Queen, and Eris had heard that she kept most of her Guardians behind the Tower’s walls.

* * *

Toland held a tomb husk.

When Eris entered the library, he did not react to her immediately. Energy from the tomb husk sent warning buzzes through the room like static or strong coffee. Although some of the charge in the room came from artifacts, some felt like it emanated from Toland himself.

Eris paused just inside the door, waiting for her robotic companion to beep softly to tell her whether there were any obstacles in her path. She had made her way up through the Tower comfortably, between her knowing the way well, the rebels telling her, and the shank Amanda Holliday had wired up for her as an assistant. Fear presented more of an obstacle than her blindness.

She knew that Toland spent most of his time in the library. He had told her that Guardians visited him, looking to trade or drawn by the frisson of power. Eriana bent her ear to the one who had helped her claw her way to the Vanguard title.

Eris said his name.

His voice was hoarse, surprise thickening the drawl until he recovered into a tone more like a teacher’s reedy command. “Welcome, Eris. This is a remarkable reversal.”

Usually, he visited her.

“It isn’t a social call,” she snapped. “If you cry to Eriana, I will tell her the truth. You knew where I and the rebels were located all along. You could have handed her victory, and you chose not to do it to preserve our secret. She will believe me.”

Eris was not entirely sure this last statement was true. The rest, though, she had planned and found solid.

Toland sighed. “Thus my goodness is rewarded.”

Eris’ stomach ached. There had been a thrill in both of them betraying their people for one another. When Eris forced herself to think about it, she concluded that Eriana’s fall had diminished different people in different ways. Toland was her diminishment. Nevertheless, he had also been a rare source of sweetness in the bitter landscape.

Hive magic had brought him to her and Hive magic had kept the two of them quiet, cocooned in fire and air. She had lain in her own bed, a shelf cut centuries ago out of rock and piled with thin blankets and thick straw pallets, with her head resting on his leg. He had rubbed his hand over her stomach to soothe her, both of them reminding the other that they had, that they _were_ bodies even as they spent so much time in the spaces of the mind. In the same way that she could feel the pressure changes in the air when he stepped through portals in the world, she could feel his thoughts move. His images of the Vanguard Queen and the Tower and formulae and fears were opened to her, green-black and foggy. In return she let him see thoughts of hunger and siege, betrayal and the wide, free mountainsides and valleys that were a Hunter’s glory.

The quick language of the mind was too intimate for the next stage of the war. Eris chose to be direct.

“I ask for your loyalty now.”

Another heavy, phlegmy sigh. He knew what she meant. “Loyalty so often means entrapment. The little I have, I have already shown to you.”

“And is there any left?” She asked.

“Why are you here?”

“To save Eriana.”

“To save her.” Toland paused to think about it. “Not to stop her?”

Eris had not been sure, before. She had needed to speak those words in order to choose. “Yes. If I can.”

“And what would you need from me, exactly?”

“To show me where she is. To explain to me her defenses and how to break them, if there are any that cannot be broken with guns.”

“If we do this, I demand amnesty if you win. There are some worse things in the universe than the Vanguard Queen, and I do not wish either of us to be defenseless against them.”

“I cannot guarantee it. I do not rule the rebels. But you and I have had little trouble keeping secrets before.”

A flicker of wind, a questing bit of power, reminded her of when he had given her a Warlock bond before they jumped into Crota’s kingdom. Eris and Toland were good at watching out for one another. Eris hoped that they would not have to be so furtive about it next time. If the Vanguard and the new Guardian retook the Tower, perhaps they would have a second chance as well.

“If you kill Eriana, will you take her place?” Toland asked.

“I will not kill her, nor take her place.”

He did not scoff, but was silent for a moment. If she had to guess she would have said he was afraid, as much of her refusal as of her possible acceptance.

“Yes, I will join you,” Toland said. “Not so much for amnesty as to break the stagnating status quo under Eriana’s burning regard.”

“Have you been waiting for me to ask?”

“I have been waiting for you in all things. Now, tell me your plan.”

She heard the thump as he set the tomb husk down.

* * *

There were guards. Praxic Warlocks, Pilgrim’s Guard Titans, and Hunters with smile-sharp blades moved to Eriana-3’s defense. Their loyalty was not bribe-weak or craven; they loved their Vanguard Queen for the glory she had brought to the Tower, for the tales she had told of wiping out evil, the evil that wore familiar faces. Their Ghosts hovered close and tired, some protected in folds of cloak or cowl. These Guardians fought bravely, and then the wall they formed was cut down the middle when Ikora Rey arrived. 

She and Cayde fought the most, against first waves of Guardians and then against Eriana herself. Other rebels joined in until the Vanguard hall was a mess of Ghosts and scorched tile and screams. There were many heroes in the scrum, names Eris knew and those she did not. There were tens of stories that took place while she watched. The fight turned into a stakeout, loud with the sizzle of fire and the blast of bullets — grimly workmanlike at first and then over in a rush of fear.

Her role kept her near the edges of the battle at first. She and Toland were both comfortable there, her Hive-sense buzzing. The fight seemed at times to be unreal, too strange and chaotic to be true in the Tower. Ikora fired a burst of Voidlight that popped in sequence, one two three and then Eriana was on one knee.

“Go.” Eris nudged Toland.

When he left he trailed sparks of energy for her to follow, motes of dark breaks in the world.

He knew the secrets of Eriana’s power. He reached out, and perhaps she stopped in her tracks. Eris imagined her surprised expression, her mouth partially open, the sparks of her power bursting behind her unadorned metal skull. Then he cut her off from her Light.

All the Guardians felt it, a moment of if not panic then weight and sorrow as Toland created a tiny restrictive zone around his queen. He bound her in a spell he and Eris had prepared, slapdash and awkward. It would not hold permanently. Nevertheless, it worked.

“What?” Eriana spoke softly, her calm tone counterpoint to the hiss of bullets still echoing in a distant scrum.

Then the rest of the sounds faded as loyalist Guardians saw what had happened to their queen, or felt it in their Light-sense. Without both, Eris could only shuffle forward, like an oracle about to speak the prophecy everyone already expected.

This is wrong, part of Eris screamed. Even after she had turned cruel, it was wrong to hurt a friend. She stumbled, then evened out both her steps and her breathing. When she wanted to, she could move as smooth as a glide. Six steps like this and she was standing beside Toland, only trusting that she was looking at Eriana.

“You are not a warlord,” Eris said.

“No. I am not.” Eriana’s voice was so familiar.

Eriana charged forward, her footsteps like gunshots. Someone — maybe Cayde, from the metallic footfalls — collared her. The two Exos tussled.

Eris herself strained to hear Eriana’s unique inflection and, when she found it, smelled the dust of a room they had once shared.

“So why do you act as if you have become one?” Eris said.

“Because I can.” Eriana’s voice was muffled, as if she was looking down.

“Rule by rule,” Toland muttered.

“Begone,” Eris told him. “You have done your work.”

“ _Have I._ ”He laughed. A zip of indrawn air might have been the sound of him licking his lips. Then he withdrew. From Eris’ left Ikora made a soft hum; Eris was unsure whether it was a sound of deep thought or a radar mark for Eris to home onto. The circle of Guardians and rebels around them shuffled and pressed in, but Eris flung her arms out and forced them to step back.

“Eriana-3,” Eris murmured, “for your help in slaying Crota, I will spare your life. But I cannot seem way to stop these Guardians if they wish to fight for you. Release them. Admit you craved power.”

“Is that such a crime?”

“It is the tactic of your enemy. You have dampened their Light, silenced their Ghosts. You have made us rebels.”

“You did that to yourselves.”

“You have lost your way. Crota ruled like this, once.”

“It took a dark power to overthrow me. How are you any better? Toland, I should have expected him to betray me. But you? I spared your life, Eris.”

_Spared my life and blinded my eyes._

_“_ Toland stayed with us even in the pit,” Eriana said. “You left us.”

The cutting accusation made Eris shudder, but she said what she had planned to anyway. “And now I will spare yours. We were vengeful once, but no longer —”

“Don’t talk like a great mantle was put on you just because you could not stand to help me help us survive. I had to save people, Eris. Guardians are so weak, and we need to do whatever we must to be strong.”

“I’m tempted to let you believe that just for the irony in how you’ll still be preaching meritocracy while Ikora drags you away. But it isn’t true. You became so obsessed with immorality you wanted everything to stagnate—“ _and wasn’t that a sin of the Traveler itself?_ She had considered this many times when Eriana took Toland into her confidence _—_ “And Wei Ning would have wanted you to live.”

Eriana did not reply. Eris wondered whether she had slumped or was readying a weapon. Tempted to reach for her own knives, she resisted only with the stubborn insistence that she try diplomacy first. Neither Ikora nor Toland would let Eriana kill her.

The silence stretched, tense. Maybe Eris’ words had affected Eriana and maybe they hadn’t. Maybe Eris had just thrown at Eriana the same words she herself heard in the dark every night. Maybe Eriana would reply with _except Wei Ning isn’t around to say_ , and the bitterness would never be drawn out of her.

Instead, Eriana sighed again. “And you do. Give me to Ikora. I think we have a lot to talk about.”

“We’ll clean the Tower up first,” Ikora said, and Eris heard her cloak swish, and perhaps the click of a gun put away.

After that Eris stood in the swirling crowd, letting it part around her, wishing she could feel Eriana’s Light. To meet her again had been a deep joy and a deep shock at once, like jumping into cold water. She had won a battle, but the tangible victory hardly seemed to matter so much as the history she had brought to bear on her old friend. Had Eriana been regretful? It was hard to tell.

Eris felt Toland come and go, heard Guardians speak in whispers and shouts as they re-negotiated ownership of the Tower. Some found friends in Eriana’s army and enacted what Eris imagined or hoped were versions of the same conversation she had just had, the gentle revelation and the choice. People walked in wide arcs around Eris, perhaps fearful.

Finally she was left with a great sense of victory, a glow like health in her chest. There would be peace.

She went to Toland and told him to find the newborn Guardian who had accompanied Ikora’s charge. They stood with Cayde and Ikora as the crowd thinned out, talking in roundabout hints about who would become the Titan Vanguard now. Eris saw the decision coming, though, like a prophecy. They would decide and the Tower would ring with laughter again, and with the banter of the Ghosts. Eriana had never really emerged from the Hive tunnels, Eris knew now. The fear of them had grown strong within her and pulled her to darkness.

Something was missing, Eris thought with a shiver, and then realized that her own many fears, of discovery or violent death or never speaking to Eriana again, had gone.

In some prophetic future, Eris hoped, her friend would return to a kinder understanding of her world. Eris turned toward Ikora, remembering her poise and control in the Tower and on the battlefield and now, after one had become the other. She listened to her talk to the newborn Guardian, a Titan, about the conduit they had found in the Black Garden.

Eris knew darkness, knew caves, knew despair. She would talk to Eriana about all of these, while Eriana waited behind whatever bars could hold her, and one day they would both be free.

 


End file.
